A small percentage of people suffering from back pain suffer from inflammatory pain in their back. This is a very small percentage, but it's important to understand the characteristics of this pain to see if your back pain actually comes from inflammation and not an unspecific pain. To understand what inflammatory back pain is, we first have to understand what inflammation is. Now inflammation is your body's natural response to damage or some type of intrusion like an infection of a virus or bacteria. Systemic responses can include fever, chills, anything that makes your body uncomfortable to deal with a foreign intruder. But if it's localized, it will include swelling, redness and tenderness are a few situations in which an inflammatory response will be inappropriate.

We talked that this is a natural response. But sometimes the body has diseases in which it can give an over inflammatory response or an inflammatory response when there's no need. This is called an inappropriate inflammatory response. And it comes about during autoimmune disease. For example, the most prominent disease of inflammatory pain in our back is called ankylosing spondylitis. This is a chronic inflammation happening in our back, which leads to a picture of a bamboo spine, as we call it, which is when the back pletely loses its flexibility.

And instead of being flexible, it looks like it feels like a bamboo stick. This inflammation of course is accompanied by chronic back pain that can be quite tough to deal with in the long run. Now when we differentiate between acute back pain, meaning in the short term, and chronic back pain, meaning in the long term, we have to understand that all chronic back pain starts off as acute meaning that it all starts at one point And we recognize and treat it as if it's acute. inflammatory back pain at the beginning might be nonspecific, and feel like any other back pain with a strain muscle or coming from another, another source. However, over time, we will be able to differentiate between inflammatory back pain and unspecific back pain. Because inflammatory back pain has a number of characteristics in which we help us differentiate between the two.

Inflammatory back pain usually happens in the younger population. This is one of the things that raise a red flag and help us already already give us the suspicion that we're dealing with an inflammatory back pain. inflammatory back pain is usually worse in the morning. You might experience morning stiffness with for a few hours, and with physical activity it will in fact get better and loosen up people with other diseases like ankylosing spondylitis. It might suffer from a number of manifestations that are outside of the back pain. One of them might be chronic diarrhea, or inflammation in our bowel system and in our digestive system.

Another type of manifestation might be arthritis or inflammation of the joints. Other than the back, this can include the knees, the fingers, the hips, the toes, any other joints in our body might be inflamed with this disease. Another one of the characteristics might be systemic general not feeling well, malaise, fatigue, all of these things with the back pain together, raises a red flag and give us a little bit of suspicion for inflammatory back pain. Now these are just some of the characteristics and I won't go very deep into each disease. But if you through these characteristics feel that you suffer from inflammatory back pain. It's important to go see a doctor because the treatment is very different.

Rheumatologists are the type of doctors that deal with these type of diseases. But your primary care physician will be able to point you out to a rheumatologist to deal with this appropriately. This brings us to the end of the video on inflammatory back pain. I hope it was informative and that you learned a lot. And again, always feel free to write any questions on the page of this lecture.